1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to syndicated data feeds in a networked computing environment. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to techniques for including data values and metadata used to generate a feed entry as part of a data syndication feed.
2. Description of the Related Art
During the past few years, web content syndication technology has grown in importance both on the Internet and in private networks. As a result, two popular standards have emerged for syndicating web content, RSS and Atom. Atom is defined by two related standards—the Atom publishing protocol and the Atom syndication format. The two Atom standards provide a feed format for representing (and a protocol for editing) web resources such as weblogs, online journals, wikis, and similar content.
A web feed generally provides a document (e.g., an XML document) with content items which include links to the source of the content. The Atom syndication format defines the syntax of a language for web feeds. In particular, the Atom Publishing Protocol is an HTTP-based approach for creating and editing Web resources. It is designed around the basic operations provided by the HTTP protocol (such as GET, PUT, and DELETE) to pass around instances of an Atom feed and entry documents that represent things like blog entries, podcasts, wiki pages, calendar entries and so on. Since being made available, Atom has been deployed to millions of web sites and is supported by every major syndication platform on the market. RSS, short for really simple syndication, provides many similar capabilities for syndicating web-based content.